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February 4, 2024

Stars in Alabama

Jessie Redmon Fauset

In Alabama
Stars hang down so low,
So low, they purge the soul
With their infinity.
Beneath their holy glance
Essential good
Rises to mingle with them
In that skiey sea.

At noon
Within the sandy cotton-field
Beyond the clay, red road
Bordered with green,
A Negro lad and lass
Cling hand in hand,
And passion, hot-eyed, hot-lipped,
Lurks unseen.

But in the evening
When the skies lean down,
He’s but a wistful boy,
A saintly maiden she,
For Alabama stars
Hang down so low,
So low, they purge the soul
With their infinity.

This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on February 4, 2024, by the Academy of American Poets.

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“Stars in Alabama” appears in The Crisis, vol. 35, no. 1 (January 1928). In Jessie Redmon Fauset, Black American Writer (The Whitston Publishing Company, 1981), literary biographer Carolyn Wedin Sylvander writes, “‘Stars in Alabama,’ in The Crisis in January 1928, contrasts in three stanzas the passionate heat of noon cotton-fields with the pure holiness of the Alabama night. [. . .] The first lines are again repeated as evening returns. Fauset has moved through this poem from personal feeling to a quietly effective comment on passion and its context.” In “The Women Poets of the Harlem Renaissance,” published in The Harlem Renaissance (Chelsea House Publishers, 2004), Maureen Honey, former professor of English and director of women’s studies at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, remarks, “While poets looked to natural settings in general for space in which to savor the abandonment of confining roles, night was sought most frequently as it was a time when the objectifying gaze was covered by sleep and the freedom to be at one with the darkness could be safely enjoyed.”

Jessie Redmon Fauset, born on April 27, 1882, in Camden County, New Jersey, was a poet, novelist, and editor from the Harlem Renaissance. She is the author of several novels, including There Is Confusion (Boni and Liveright, 1924) and Plum Bun (Matthews & Marrot, 1928). Fauset also served as the editor of The Crisis from 1919 to 1926. She died on April 30, 1961.

The Crisis, vol. 35, no. 1
(January 1928)

“In the Evening” by Fenton Johnson
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“Georgia Dusk” by Jean Toomer
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Thanks to Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, author of The Age of Phillis (Wesleyan University Press, 2020), who curated Poem-a-Day for this month’s weekdays. Read or listen to a Q&A about Jeffers’s curatorial approach and find out more about our Guest Editors for the year.

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"Stars in Alabama" by Jessie Redmon Fauset

Stars in Alabama

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Older messages

"Sport" by Langston Hughes

"Calculus I, II, III" by Brad Walrond

"Counsel to a Bridegroom" by Bala Saho

"There is no mortal art / Can overcome Time’s deep, corroding rust"

"[Song into holiness]" by Jay Wright

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